Domain Names and Voice Recognition
Mark Comments on ‘Peak Domain’ vignette:
Great story, and hopefully for all "domainers", true. How fast and to what degree Google and the rest of the gang put into motion voice recognition search has yet to be seen. This ain’t your mothers voice recognition. Saw it at a JP Morgan private investor show. Hate to spoil the love fest….but….it might give someone cause for concern. Even more telling was the announcement by the boys that the "major" (whatever that means) computer manufacturers will have it incorporated within the "next few cycles" (whatever they meant by that).
Not sure what the overall effect will be if any, but couldn’t help but do a double take on the one remark of it "being much easier for the user to specifically find what they are looking for without the need of an address or direct intervention"????What the hell does that mean….search by psychic abilities?
***FS*** I think voice recognition will actually help certain domain names and direct navigation. Think about it this way.. right now your fingers basically do what your mouth would in a voice recognition setting.. So instead of certain typo domain names.. you’ll have people sound-alike squatting on "pizza burning" instead of "beast of burden" or on "kiss this guy" instead of "kiss the sky" (to use two popular song examples).
So while typos of a certain color may get wiped-out, new soundalikes will be spawned and long domain names with incredibly high search engine query counts but low keyboard type in numbers like "free psychic readings .com" or "sexual dysfunction .com" will get a boost as people are freed to quickly voice-out long strings which were previously awkward or ungainly to type..
I too am not entirely clear what the individual who said "…being much easier for the user to specifically find what they are looking for without the need of an address…" might have been alluding to, but a few things convince me that domain name addresses and domain address navigation are just not going away:
1) I rented a car in LA with voice activation and satellite navigation.. "you still need an address to tell the car where to go" as Ron Jackson recently pointed out.. The world has not figured out a way around addressing in hundreds of years.. You can invent a new addressing system for people, but you can’t usurp the address all together.
2) "There is no email without a domain name" (that’s my favorite Yun Ye quote by the way) .. and you are not going to make email go away. The software companies have tried to control or replace the open email standard with assorted messaging services etc.. but that has not worked because too many third party applications have been written around the open email standard.. there are too many forces pushing for email and against assorted messaging services.. There is no email without a domain name address.. You can say the "@" domain "DOT" extension or you can type it on a keyboard.. but there’s no practical way around, which I have read or heard.
3) What are you going to advertise? Think of television and the radio. Think of bus benches and billboards, think of magazines and newspapers.. you absolutely need ’some kind of address‘ or unique identifier to call folks to action – even with voice recognition.
I am with you though.. I would love to understand how the computer manufacturers or search platforms create a useful way around the present realm.
I remember attending the Bill Gates keynote at Comdex Las Vegas in 1996. Bill told an icebreaker joke to the effect that he was walking in downtown Seattle and somebody asked him for $5 .. Bill gracefully declined this gent’s request, as Bill walked away the chap shouted: "But I’ve got my own URL!" .. so Bill turned around and gave him five bucks. I remember that joke because it was the first time I ever heard the word ‘URL’ and didn’t even know what one was or why the crowd thought it was funny. Bill then screened a video of ‘the future’ .. there was voice recognition, routine video conferencing for all kinds of people and for the most mundane day to day things.. all sorts of advanced file sharing. None of it has come to pass. None of it in 10 years .. not in the meaningful commercial way portrayed at least.
But 10 years later I have figured out what a URL is.. others have not.. but we all need them and we all use them. Whether we speak the URL, type the URL or use our Wii controller to do the hula and gyrate the extension in… one way or another, you need an address.
Hi Frank,
One thing to remember about this speech-recognition news: Google’s implementation will have the speech query run through their search engine. As far as I’ve been told, it will *not work as a “direct navigation through the address bar” tool.
Sites with content that have been indexed will do well. Everyone else (parked pages) will be left out in the cold.
Makes perfect Google sense. But yes, we’ll have to wait and see.
***FS*** Too many of the best domain names in the world and the most natural extensions are owned by folks that don’t meet Google’s standards.. Google would turn their utility into an intranet that doesn’t work for all people.. Take webhealth.com .. it gets 900 type ins a day (up from 70 last month [type-ins to webhealth.com alone]) but the URL will never get indexed in Google (unless the relax their standards)because I will never build the site to be Google friendly. Yet it has real (ungamed) content and real daily return visitors.. you can only monkey with navigation or shape results so far till some users ‘opt out’ and hit the address bar. If you don’t allow people to navigate the way they desire, some component of the internet populace will abandon the platform and ‘that’ is what direct nav is all about.. that small percentage each day who do not use the Google platform, but which cumulatively (across all search terms/queries/addresses) account for more than 50% of global internet navigation.. These folks add up to the entire internet universe over the course of a year, despite Google’s attempts to play keep-away.
Voice and Domains
There seems to be some buzz on the topic of voice recognition and how it relates to domain names.Over at
I touched on this a little today in my blog.
As for a useful way… I do believe I have the answer. Okay, perhaps not *the* answer, but *an* answer, and likely one of the best ones.
But then that’s why I make the big bucks, right? I just wish I made the big bucks
Hi Frank,
Although I agree with your assessment that if the VR goes to a search engine rather than a browser that “some component of the internet populace will abandon the platform,” those who do are the tech-savvy populace that know what they’re looking for and very rarely click on ads.
While type-in traffic may still exist, I believe monetizing that traffic will be exponentially more difficult than it is today.
***FS*** I saw this scenario coming before Google became a registrar.. so we’ll have to wholely disagree cdc.. A “Google quality overlay” or “pick-and-choose navigation” just won’t work.
As my Bill Gates video presentation example illustrates, the population which embraces VR “at all” will be the most tech savvy first .. followed by the masses after it becomes so very useful that we all can’t resist .. (ie skype) What I am going to say next is the most misunderstood (disputed) characteristic of domain names: “People know what they want when they type-in domain names they haven’t visited before”. You or Google might see a parked name that needs to be eliminated or a behavior which needs to be corrected, others see a content destination with advertising that they use as a tool to navigate ‘outside of Google’. Deny ‘the people’ the ability to navigate to a parked name (or any name) which they “truly want” (type-in) and its like denying them the ability to get to cnn.com or google.com .. users begin to think the internet (or the tool they are using to browse it) is somehow broken. We’ve seen this before in unrelated forms and people ‘always’ find their way. I could go on for hours about this, but suffice it to say, navigation has not fundamentally changed since 1994 (Netscape 1) .. I don’t see a palpable change ’sticking’ around without challenge now. There are too many effected, too many would-be search competitors and browser manufacturers willing to offer a viable alternative when users get disenfranchised .. It’s one thing to search for restaurants and google gives you mcdonalds, but its entirely another to ‘navigate’ to restaurants.com and not get there because Google won’t index it. Search is search, navigation is navigation.
Again I realize this argument may not sway you, so we’ll just have to wait and see what the river brings.
“you absolutely need ’some kind of address’ or unique identifier to call folks to action – even with voice recognition.”
replace “even” with “especially” and you see why Voice Recognition drives certain domains up in value even more.
I use VR to autodial my friends because I can’t remember their numbers. I simply say “Frank Cell” But when I say “Jorge Cell” the robot says back “did you mean to Harvey?” and this exchange goes on through 20 names until I do it manually. That’s what’s going to happen with domain speak-ins.
Google has seen you all over the WHOIS, and has decided in their infinite wisdom that someone who has as many domains as you couldn’t POSSIBLY have the time to put any useful content on them.
That’s why webhealth.com sucks in google ranking.
***FS*** They don’t like the names, they don’t like the color of my eyes.. whatever the reason.. Google is broken from my users perspective because people are chatting about the content we offer and visiting the site by going ‘around’ Google.. this is an achiles heel of their algo.
I think Frank has more or less nailed it here.
Voice recognition is a substitute inputting system that might one day be a viable alternative to a keyboard for those that like that sort of thing. Personally, I think keyboards are accurate and fast, but not everyone shares my enthuisiasm.
Internet Protocols demand and IP address. How much simpler can it get than a 12 digit number soon to be an 18 digit number. That is what all computers use and they are not going away.
Human cannot cope with memorising these numbers so we need to get a handle on them. That is where your domain names come in. Also an often forgotten aspect is that we need names and addresses to be separate so that we can reallocate IPs to addresses without having to reissue new address each time we change hosting or make other structural changes on the Internet. In short we need alias for our IP address and we call them domains.
Can the system be improved upon? Well about the only thing you could propose that might be seen to be an improvement is an an extensionless name. Remove the extensions, however and the ability to serve the needs of a global community is going to be serverly compromised.
The bottom line is that the system we have is just about optimal and changing it would be a nightmare, so it isn’t going to happen.
I think Frank also has a good point about typos being replaced with “phonics” if voice recognition becomes more prevalent.
Will voice recognition have significant impact in other ways vis-a-vis the domain system. No probably not.
One problem I would throw into the mix, is that voice recognition is going to have a few problems working out which language you are in from a few syllables. I guess they are somehow going to have to tie it all back into the default language set in the operating system.
It will be weird for all this voice recognition when come to effect let say some one say I am seeking date for tonight
so the right domain will be
seekingdate.com
seekingdatefortonite.com
Iamseekingdatefortonite.com
That will make Iamseekingdatefortonite.com be more match than seekingdate.com
So may be another type of domain will become popular ie
Iamlookingforcarrentalinnewyork.com
LookingforbestItalianrestaurantindowntownchicago.com
long way to go
myzine.com
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***FS*** Loooooong domains will get a pop (value / traffic) with VR.. jmo